In my current project, we do a bunch of work revolving around Elasticsearch and enabling our customers to quickly access the relevant portions of our large data set. A couple of weeks ago I was asked to come up with a method to compare the costs of working with NGrams and Edge NGrams. I tried to make my life easier and look around the Internet for somebody else’s breakdown but I didn’t find anything I would like. So I decided to bite the bullet and do the work myself. In this post and the follow up one, I would like to present my way of reasoning about NGrams and Edge NGrams.

After a solid break from both the blogging and certifications, I decided to get back into the game and attempted the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate certification. It was sort of inevitable for a person in my situation. The products I am helping to create and manage run in AWS, and given the company’s commitment to embrace the cloud it only made sense to become familiar with the fundamentals of this platform. Amazon describes Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a secure cloud services platform, offering compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow. Corporate PR aside, AWS is really cool piece of technology allowing you to do pretty much anything. Having day-to-day practical experience with this platform and desire to learn more led me to explore more and more till I took and passed the exam. Here are some notes I would like to share regarding this experience. Read more ›

This is the second post about presenting I have written. To catch up on the reasons why one should consider the use of HTML-based presentation framework, please refer to my previous post Presenting with reveal.js.

When it comes to documenting the APIs (especially the REST ones), having the cURL samples that one can try out and play around with has become the defacto standard these days. However if you actually want to read through the response body, look up certain piece of information or just simply check the integrity of the response itself, you will run into a big inconvenience that comes with cURL – the format of the response body. Don’t get me wrong, I love cURL as much as the next guy, but the things can be improved upon. And that is the aim of this article.

There are many cool things one can do to leverage the power of Slack – private channels, embedding various content, searching all the messages from one place, sharing files and code, using some of the many available integrations or building one yourself. In this post I will focus on the last one. I have finished such an implementation myself recently. My project was a creation of a simple Slack bot for scheduling foosball games for my teammates called Foosie. It is a Spring Boot application that I open-sourced and it is available on GitHub. In this article I will share some of the noteworthy aspects of this little project and hopefully entice you to give it a try yourself. Read more ›